“But, Tom! you didn’t take the money?”

“How could I refuse so good a man?  Norman is on his way to Pennsylvania at this present moment, with a letter of credit in his pocket big enough to make the mouth of even a professional grafter water.  At least, I hope it is big enough.”

She was hurt, shocked, horrified, and he knew it and found pleasure of a certain sort in the knowledge.  When a man has done violence to his own best impulses, the thing that comes nearest to the holy joy of penitence is the unholy joy of making somebody else sorry for him.  There were unmistakable tears in her voice when she said: 

“Tom, why have you told me this—­this unspeakable thing?”

“Why—­I guess it was because I wanted to ask you how you supposed the Mr. Henniker kind of men square such things with their conscience; or don’t they have any conscience?”

“That is not the reason,” she faltered.

“You are right,” he rejoined quickly.  “It was diabolism pure and unstrained.  I had hurt myself, and I wanted to pass it along—­to hurt some one else.  But it is too cold to keep you standing here.  Won’t you come in again?”

“No; I must go home.”  And she went down the broad steps.

He drew her arm through his and walked with her, down one grassy slope and up the other.  At the manor-house steps he found at last sufficient grace to say:  “It was a currish thing to do; will you forgive me, Ardea?”

“I don’t know,” she said, in a tone that thrilled him curiously.  “Such things are hard to forgive.  I don’t mean your slapping me in the face with it, that is nothing.  But to know that you have gone so far aside ... that you have sunk your manhood and all the promise of it....”

He nodded perfect intelligence.  “I know; it’s hell, Ardea.  I’ve been frizzling in it for the past six months, more or less; ever since I came home with the one sole, single determination to climb out of the panic ditch if I had to make steps of dead bodies or lost souls.  I’m doing it, and I’m paying the price.  Sometimes I can find it in my heart to curse the mistaken mother-love that gave me to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  I’m pagan in all else, but I can’t sin like a pagan.  Why is it?  Why can’t I be a smug, peaceful, sound-sleeping scoundrel like other men?”

She was standing on the step above him, as she had stood on the other side of the two dew-wet lawns.

“I have a theory,” she rejoined, “but you wouldn’t accept it.  You’ll never be able to do wrong without paying for it.  Is it worth while to try?”

“Nothing is worth while—­nothing at all.  I don’t mean that I’m going to quit; I shall doubtless go on trampling and grinding the face of the poor, and the rich, if they come in my way.  But at the end of the ends I shall curse God and die, as Job’s wife wanted him to.”

She put her hands on his shoulders impulsively, and again the tears were in her voice.